Page 109 of Unveiled

Xiathen knelt beside the bed, his eyes wide. “You both vanished. The mark. Oh gods, the mark has changed again.”

Adrian looked down. The sigils no longer flickered. They glowed with two intertwined colours: the Veil’s violet and Connor’s wolf gold.

Connor exhaled slowly, brushing hair from Adrian’s forehead.

“Next time,” Adrian murmured, his voice hoarse, “we’re taking a nap instead of fighting the metaphysical embodiment of your psyche.”

Connor huffed a laugh, raw and disbelieving. “Aye. I’ll put it on the schedule. I saw your story as well. But that’s a tale for another time.”

Adrian leaned his head on Connor’s shoulder.

Xiathen inhaled shakily. “There will be consequences.”

Connor kissed Adrian’s temple. “We’ll face him.”

Adrian’s fingers curled into Connor’s shirt. “Together.”

Outside the castle, across the valley, every fault line, every anchor, and every glowing crack pulsed once, in time with the beating of two hearts.

***

Connor

The following morning, Alicia found him before he’d made it three steps into the room where he was about to address his pack.

She barrelled into his legs with the single-minded force only a six-year-old recovering from a very frightening week could manage, and Connor caught her out of habit, swinging her up onto his hip without breaking stride. She smelled of woodsmoke and the peppermint Moira kept for scaring off winter colds.

“You’re not dead,” she informed him solemnly, as though she’d been keeping a list and was pleased to strike him off it.

“Not yet, dèan,” Connor said. “Working on staying that way.”

“Good.” She considered this settled, then moved briskly on to matters of actual importance. “Moira says if you’re all done saving everyone by the twenty-fifth, we can still do the tree. She’s already got the box down from the east tower. It has the sad angel in it. The one with half a wing.”

Behind him, Connor heard Fraser make a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh and wasn’t quite a snort.

“The twenty-fifth,” Connor repeated slowly.

“Christmas,” Alicia said, with the withering patience of someone explaining the obvious to a particularly slow adult. “It’s coming. It comes every year, Uncle Connor, that’s rather the point of it.”

Twelve days. He hadn’t let himself count until just now, and the number landed harder than he’d expected—a date sitting there in the ordinary world, indifferent to fault lines and rends and whatever the Council intended to do to Heatherfell before it arrived. Twelve days for a valley that couldn’t currently promise itself twelve hours.

“We’ll do the tree,” he heard himself say. “Sad angel and all.”

“Even if there’s more monsters?”

“Especially if there’s more monsters.” He set her down, and she scampered off toward Moira with the news, already negotiating the finer points of tinsel allocation.

Adrian appeared at his shoulder, unfairly composed for a man who’d nearly died twice in the last day. “Monsters permitting,” he murmured, “I do hope this castle has decent mulled wine. I refuse to face Hogmanay sober, whatever the Veil has planned for us.”

“You’re looking forward to Hogmanay now, are you?”

“I was invited by a seven-year-old with very firm opinions about angel repair. I don’t see how I could possibly decline.” Adrian’s smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Connor. Twelve days.”

“Aye,” Connor said, and the word came out rougher than he meant it to. “I heard her.”

Neither of them said what they were both thinking—that the valley’s calendar and the human one had stopped keeping the same time weeks ago, and that whatever waited for them out past the solstice might not particularly care whether Alicia got her tree up first.

***